


Tonight's a party for the misfits

by Spylace



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Body Horror, Gen, M/M, No animals were hurt in the making of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 20:39:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turning into a dog should be a humiliating but a survivable process. It’s not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tonight's a party for the misfits

In the beginning, there is only pain.

 

Bucky struggles to move but finds himself pinned down by the weight of the world. There is not an ounce of strength left in him to stretch a pinky but he tries anyway, limbs twitching pathetically like a landed fish, the oxygen mask torn askew from his face.

He’s lost his arm again—Steve was going to kill him.

He opens his eyes.

Natasha straddles him as she might a lover, swinging a stockinged knee over his lap like Berlin 1997. His skin gives way where her knife passes, blood lapping her palms like a sluice of warm water to reveal effigies laid in silver, carved bones of monsters that once roamed the seven seas.

His shoulder protrudes, grotesque and monstrous like an ancient machine. The chrome finish is dripping, still slick with blood. He can see where it had once been connected to his body before coming loose, empty sockets staring down like the wrong end of a barrel, breaking his spine like a string of beads.

Bucky throws up in his mouth a little and it tastes of blood. He lurches in the throes of panic, back arching, laid bare like cadavers at a museum. He snaps at the invading hands as they seek to pin him down but they do not draw back. Instead, one curls around his mouth, closing his teeth around the scraped knuckles as though trying to share his pain.

Steve pushes their foreheads together, his other hand curled around the silk tassels of his ears.

Bucky can only bite harder, letting their blood spread across his tongue.

 

“We’re losing him.”

 

Their target is a teenage girl, young but powerful enough that her magic hurt when it hit, doesn’t dissolve like harmless glitter. When they receive the call, they think it’s a joke. At least he does. Steve crosses his arms and puts on his most disappointed face. Bucky laughs and blows him a kiss for the effort.

Sadly, their mission is blown before it even begins. Natasha nearly has her head taken off. Steve hits the fire alarm to get everyone out.

The girl’s magic is all over the place, thick and cloying like a snow shower. Trees turn into towering columns of cotton candy, sign posts twist into all manners of abstract art and cars become a menagerie of stampeding animals.

The first bolt of lightning hits like a fist and send Steve’s shield spinning into the grass. Bucky shoves him out of the way of the next, taking the hit that was meant for him.

 

For a long time, there is quiet and there is fear.

 

He falls in the wind with his hand outstretched, terrified as the train pulls farther and farther away. The impact breaks all the bones in his body and a few more things besides, punching the last of the air from his tattered lungs. He drowns in the river, his flesh rendered to meat. What the Russians find is not a man but a corpse.

 

A spray of embers scatter across his hide but he cannot feel it, he can’t feel anything. Stark looks up from his bloody work, hair greasy and a touch of silver on his chin. He sucks in his cheeks, fires up a torch and it _burns_.

 

The girl is hysterical; her voice shrill like it’s digging into his brain. “ _I can’t! I can’t! I don’t know how! Oh god I didn’t mean to!_ ”

 

It should have been funny, a touch humiliating. Barton would have tried to put a collar on him, Steve would have stopped it, Thor would have slipped him all kinds of junk food on the sly and Fury would have stared at them like he regretted enlisting anyone but the Black Widow to his initiative.

He would have had to be benched. They would have had to make up new rules to accommodate his new shape and maybe Steve wouldn’t have been so quick to blush, stammer excuses and hightail out of the room when they were caught snuggling on the couch.

Stark would have held it over him for months but he won’t now. Not when he’s had to cut parts out of his body piece by piece.

They take his ribs, his arm and the shoulder but leave the mangled spine inside and reflate him like a balloon. Steve tells him, he’s _okay_ , he’s _fine_ , everything is going to be _alright_ and knows that he is lying.

 

Bucky licks his face and tastes the salt on his skin.

 

It’s no good—the Soviets had to replace a lot of his bones just so he could use his arm. Even with Zola’s formula, whatever cocktail the Red Room came up with, he’s looking at retirement. He won’t recover from this. It would be a mercy to put him down.

 

“Can it help him?”

Banner’s voice is a tired sigh, like a sudden burst of wind through the falling snow.

“Steve, last time I checked, you weren’t a lizard.”

 

“And the girl?”

“She’ll be given a choice. Xavier’s or one of ours.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Fury confirms. He adds unnecessarily, “She’s a minor Captain.”

Bucky doesn’t recognize Steve’s voice when he says, “She almost _killed_ him.”

“She says the spell wears off in twenty-four hours if he survives.”

“...What are you saying?”

 

“What about you?”

“I’m the last thing he needs.”

“You don’t know that Bruce, please.”

Steve’s breath hitches and Bucky lets out a small growl, his eyes peeling back just enough to glimpse Banner looking right at him.

“I don’t” he says. “That’s why I’m asking him.”

 

The needle slips in the soft inside of his elbow. He can’t feel it but he still trembles a little when it goes in. Steve strokes his cheeks and ears.

“Bucky, I—”

**Author's Note:**

> What did I just write?


End file.
